Centene said it offered buyouts to some employees on Monday, as the health insurer grapples with higher medical costs, funding cuts and membership declines.
“Centene is positioning the company to lead the future of healthcare — working to deliver a simpler and better experience for our members and partners while meeting the realities of today’s healthcare environment,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “Today we announced a Voluntary Separation Program to support employees who may be considering a transition.”
The company did not indicate how many employees were offered buyouts or how much it is aiming to reduce its workforce. Shares initially fell 4% after Bloomberg first reported the news on Monday.
Layoffs could follow if the company doesn’t meet the target for voluntary separations, Bloomberg reported.
Centene is the largest Medicaid provider and is focused on other federal health plans through Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. The buyouts come after the company reported a decline in membership in the first quarter, down 6% year over year to 26.3 million, according to a filing.
Centene’s ACA business lost about 2 million members in the first quarter compared with the end of 2025, primarily because Congress let enhanced federal subsidies in the program expire at the start of the year. The company in March also said it expects ACA membership to fall nearly 40% by the end of 2026, executives said in March at a Barclays conference.
Centene is bracing for the impact of more than $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid over a decade, and the broader insurance industry is still managing higher-than-expected medical costs in privately-run Medicare plans.

Fox Corp. has agreed to buy the streaming pioneer Roku in a cash-and-stock deal valued at approximately $22 billion, including debt.
Roku will continue to be run as an open, partner-friendly platform, the companies said Monday, and there appears to be no immediate changes that customers will see. Fox and Roku said that the combined company will become the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.
Media reports had surfaced on Friday that Roku was looking at its strategic options, including a possible sale. Speculation was rampant as to which companies might be interested in an acquisition. Aside from Fox, names being tossed about as potential buyers included Netflix, Amazon, Comcast and Disney.
The deal will give Fox access to more than 100 million global households, along with the Roku channel and its first-party data. Fox oversees a massive sports, news and entertainment network, as well as Tubi, which it acquired in 2020.
Roku founder Anthony Wood had initially worked within Netflix in the early 2000s as that company attempted to make the seismic shift from renting DVDs, to streaming.
Roku was spun off by Netflix, however, and the company released its first set-top box in 2008.
Wood, who is Roku’s chairman and CEO, said his motivation in pursuing the technology was his desire to record and play his favorite show, “Star Trek.”
Fox Corp. CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement that combining the businesses will bring together Fox’s live news and sports content with a streaming platform with large viewership. It will also give Fox more exposure to advertising and streaming subscriptions.
“The combination with FOX is an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate our vision, scale faster and innovate more aggressively for viewers, partners and advertisers,” Wood said in prepared remarks.
Wood will have an ongoing role at the company and will join the Fox board of directors after the transaction closes.
Murdoch said during a conference call that the combined company will be better positioned for the next decade of video than either company would’ve been alone.
“We are confident this is the right transaction, at the right moment, for all the right reasons,” he said.
Fox will pay $96 in cash and 0.9693 shares of its Class A common stock for each Roku Class A and Class B share outstanding. The transaction is valued at $160 per Roku share.
Existing Fox shareholders are expected to own approximately 73% of the combined company and Roku shareholders will own about 27%, once the deal closes.
The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year. It still needs approval from Fox and Roku shareholders and also regulatory approval.
Fox’s stock declined before the market open, while shares of Roku rose slightly.

A group made up of dozens of cybersecurity experts, including several well-known veterans of the industry, published an open letter to the U.S. government asking it to lift the export control order on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models.
According to the open letter, “this action has taken the best models away from [cybersecurity] defenders” who now can’t use the models to find vulnerabilities and make their software and products more secure.
“To pull the best capabilities away from defenders without a good reason when our adversaries are rapidly advancing is dangerous,” read the letter.
On Friday, the U.S. government ordered Anthropic to limit the export of Fable and Mythos, citing national security concerns, without explaining the specific reasons behind the order, according to Anthropic. In response, the company suspended access to the models to all users worldwide.
As of this writing, the letter is signed by 76 cybersecurity experts, including Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief of security; Casey Ellis, the founder bug bounty platform Bugcrowd; Jon Callas, famed cryptographer and former Apple security design and architecture manager; Paul Vixie, computer scientist ; Dino Dai Zovi, the former head of applied security engineering at Block; Katie Moussouris, the founder of Luta Security; and Rachel Tobac, the CEO of the security awareness training firm SocialProof Security.
When Mythos launched as a preview in April, Anthropic claimed it was so powerful at finding security vulnerabilities that the company needed to tightly restrict access to prevent malicious hackers or foreign adversaries from using it to cause havoc on the internet. In practice, that meant Anthropic gave around 50 companies initial access to Mythos, recently expanding that group to include around 150 organizations in 15 countries.
Last week, Anthropic released Fable, a public version of Mythos that the company said had strict guardrails to block its use in the fields of biology, chemistry, and cybersecurity, as well as to stop others from distilling the model in order to re-create it. The guardrails on Fable were so strict that many cybersecurity experts found that it stopped essentially any prompts related to cybersecurity.
Anthropic said that the White House export control order may have been based on a report that there was a method to bypass — or jailbreak — Fable to unlock its powerful Mythos-level capabilities.
According to Katie Moussouris, one of the signatories of the open letter, the method was demonstrated by Amazon researchers in a paper that is not public but that she has reviewed.
But Moussouris said in a blog post that the paper did not actually demonstrate a real jailbreak. Instead, she wrote, the researchers simply asked Fable to fix open source code with public and known vulnerabilities along with “deliberately planted vulnerabilities,” after the model initially refused to “review the code for security issues.”
“The behavior described in the paper cannot meaningfully be fixed, and any attempt would only weaken the model for defense,” Moussouris wrote. “Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day.”
Moussouris’ critique was echoed in the open letter, which also said that the group of experts believe the model capabilities in the Amazon paper “can be replicated” on OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, on Anthropic’s own publicly available Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet, “and even Chinese models like Kimi 2.7.”
Moussouris told TechCrunch that “the bugs used to demonstrate the techniques in the paper can be found using the other models. The method in the paper is a guardrail bypass technique. Other models that lack the Fable guardrails often won’t refuse the straightforward request to look for security bugs, so they don’t need a bypass.”
The letter also asked for transparently and fairly enforced regulations created by “a democratic rule-making process” that are based on scientific research done by industry and academic experts, and “used only to the minimal extent necessary to ensure the safety of the American public.”

Salesforce announced on Monday that it will acquire AI customer service platform Fin for $3.6 billion. Formerly known as Intercom, Fin offers an AI agent that can resolve customer queries across channels, using live chat, WhatsApp, SMS, phone calls, Slack, and more.
Salesforce says it wants to use Fin’s team and technology to improve Agentforce, its existing enterprise platform that businesses can use to build custom AI agents that automate tasks.
“Fin brings proven agent technology, a deep commitment to customer success, and an incredible AI team that will complement Agentforce with powerful service agent capabilities,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a statement. “Together, we’ll help companies of every size seize this opportunity — accelerating time to value with trusted agents that deliver measurable outcomes at scale.”
The transaction is expected to close in the last quarter of Salesforce’s 2027 fiscal year, which is actually slated for the first few months of 2027 because of how the company reports its financials.
“To our customers: Over the past few years we’ve been shipping intensely. Including recently our groundbreaking model, Apex, and our paradigm-defining internal agent, Operator,” wrote Fin co-founder and CEO Eoghan McCabe in an X post. “With the resources of Salesforce this will only accelerate. And yet little will practically change. I’ll still be CEO, Des will still be running R&D, we’ll both still be committed to continuing to lead this category. Thank you very sincerely and deeply for your belief in us.”

SpaceX’s share price continued to rise on Monday, the company’s first full day of trading, adding to its sharp move higher on Friday after its record-breaking public listing.
Elon’s Musk’s rocket maker and artificial intelligence company rose about 6 percent in early trading on Monday. In a frenzied few hours of trading on Friday, the day of the company’s market debut, SpaceX rose nearly 20 percent.
The gain crowned Mr. Musk, 54, as the world’s first trillionaire and quelled jitters on Wall Street about whether investors would accept the company’s lofty valuation.
SpaceX’s initial public offering raised $75 billion at a valuation of $1.77 trillion, the largest I.P.O. on record. It has come to be seen as bellwether for other giant technology companies, namely Anthropic and OpenAI, seeking to go public this year.
After its latest gains, SpaceX was worth over $2.2 trillion in market value. Anthropic and OpenAI, which have developed foundational A.I. models and chatbots, are each expected to go public with valuations approaching $1 trillion.
SpaceX’s giant I.P.O. topped the previous record set by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, that raised more than $29 billion when it went public in 2019.
Mr. Musk and SpaceX redefined the space industry with partly reusable rockets and a satellite internet service, Starlink. In February, SpaceX bought Mr. Musk’s A.I. company, xAI, which also owned the social media platform, X, in a sweeping move to consolidate his business empire. By merging the companies, Mr. Musk provided a financial lifeline to xAI, which has spent billions of dollars trying to catch up with its rivals.
SpaceX, which has contracts with NASA and other federal agencies, had long been something of a financial mystery and functioned, at times, as a kind of piggy bank for Mr. Musk since 2002, when the company was founded.
But last month, the company revealed a full picture of its finances for the first time in preparation of the market debut. It reported that it had lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, because of increased expenditures on A.I. Revenue was $18.7 billion last year, up 33 percent from the previous year.